NEW YORK \u2014 The last supermoon of the year will shine soon in December skies.<\/p>\n
The moon’s orbit around the Earth isn’t a perfect circle so it gets nearer and farther as it swings around. When a full moon is closer to Earth in its orbit, a so-called supermoon happens. It makes the moon look up to 14% bigger and 30% brighter than the faintest moon of the year, according to NASA.<\/p>\n
Supermoons happen a few times a year in clusters, taking advantage of the sweet spot in the moon’s elliptical orbit, and Thursday night’s event is the last of three in a row in 2025.<\/p>\n
The supermoon can be glimpsed in clear night skies without any special equipment. But it can be tough to discern the subtle change with the naked eye.<\/p>\n
Whether a supermoon or not, the moon also appears bigger when it’s close to the horizon because of what’s called the moon illusion. It’s a strange visual trick that experts can’t yet explain.<\/p>\n
“When you have a supermoon, that effect is just slightly more striking,” said astronomer William Alston with the University of Hertfordshire.<\/p>\n
Tides could be slightly higher during a supermoon because the moon is closer to Earth, but again, the difference isn’t very noticeable.<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK \u2014 The last supermoon of the year will shine soon in December skies. The moon’s orbit…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":418226,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[419,418,407,421,420,425,1759,50,422,423,159,62,399,314,67,132,68,424,313],"class_list":{"0":"post-418225","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-cars","9":"tag-classifieds","10":"tag-education","11":"tag-homes","12":"tag-jobs","13":"tag-local","14":"tag-nature","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-radio","17":"tag-salt-lake","18":"tag-science","19":"tag-sports","20":"tag-television","21":"tag-traffic","22":"tag-united-states","23":"tag-unitedstates","24":"tag-us","25":"tag-utah","26":"tag-weather"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115646937430240185","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/418226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}